Kick the tires and light the fires!

We are excited to announce a new set of updates for our 8-Bit series of RTS games (8-Bit Armies, 8-Bit Hordes, 8-Bit Invaders) out now. With feedback from the community we have hunted down bugs, tuned things up and even the virtuoso Frank Klepacki has provided three new music tracks which you can experience in-game as well as in the soundtrack DLC.

Some of the standout changes we have made include fixing up the exploit that allowed players to see when a resource node was being used. Some changes to the Gremlin and Heavy Drone. As well as several fixes that should smooth out the remaining hiccups some players were experiencing.

Check out the changelog below for details:

- "8-Bit Funk" - (Armies)
- "Sorcerer's Ambush" - (Hordes)
- "Bug Hunt" - (Invaders)

- Replaced News Cranioid with more current news about new game (9-Bit Armies!) coming out.
- Updated leaderboard links to include only those that are actively supported.

- Gremlin (Marines):
- Area-effect radius of heal doubled to 100 (was 50).

- Heavy Drone (Guardians):
- MG weapon casting seconds reduced to 0 (was 0.3)
- Reduced damage per shot to 2 (was 3)
- These changes together increase base DPS for MG weapon to 10 (was 6)
- Rocket weapon cooldown reduced to 2.2 seconds (was 2.7)
- Rocket base damage increased to 6 (was 5)
- These changes together increase base DPS for Rocket weapon to 7.27 (was 5.26)

- Improved/Fixed very long startup and load times that could occur randomly.
- Fixed a bug that automatically selected the Intel integrated graphics over an Nvidia device on some laptops.
- Fixed a rendering slowdown related to particles.
- Fixed a crash that could happen following a large number of weapon impacts on terrain.
- Fixing issue in which Hordes harvester was misnamed in German and was also using French translation.
- Fixed bug in which the Orbital Cannon superweapon alarm is repeated continuously if destroyed just before firing.
- Fixed hard-coded text in the tooltips for Units and Structures which appeared in English no matter which language was selected.
- Fixed animation issue around resource nodes. Resource nodes will no longer animate (giving away harvester locations) when under fog of war.

Commanders, the wait is over. Introducing 9-Bit Armies: A Bit Too Far - the thrilling sequel to the Real-Time Strategy game 8-Bit Armies! Venture into a world of pixelated warfare, expansive campaigns, engaging multiplayer, all in a fusion of battlefields.

🔹 Two Campaigns: Choose your side in a conflict spanning 30 missions.
🔹 Nautical Warfare: From stealthy submarines to adaptable amphibious units, rule the waves and control the map.
🔹 Play With Friends: Conquer the campaign in Co-Op or join against others in huge maps supporting up to 8 armies.
🔹 Classic Base-Building: Wage war against unrelenting enemies whilst building your base to adapt and overcome.
🔹 Blast It All To Bits: Destructible environments on a wide variety of maps where you can destroy cities, rebuild bridges, and enter the fray on land, sea, and air.
🔹 More Pixels, More Fun: Coming from 8 Bit Armies? Discover new units, new abilities and bigger maps!
🔹 Mod Support: Customize your game with community made maps, units, and game rules! You can even create whole new scenarios and game modes to play and share with others!
🔹 A Legendary Legacy: From the same team that brought you RTS classics such as Star Wars: Empire at War™ , Universe at War™, Grey Goo™, and the Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection!

We're back with a new update for the game!

Over the last couple years we've been making improvements to our core RTS engine tech which has resulted in fixing a number of long-standing issues. With your help, we've retroactively applied those fixes to our 8-Bit Series which means a new update for you! As an added bonus, a new song has been added to each game which you can hear in-game and also separately if you own the soundtrack. And, we have made the game more Linux-friendly to boot!

The full list of changes include...

• Three new music tracks added (one each for 8-Bit Armies, 8-Bit Hordes, and 8-Bit Invaders) Those songs are:
  
• * Click Move Attack (8-Bit Armies)
  
• * Bonded Allies (8-Bit Hordes)
  
• * Raygun Scatter (8-Bit Invaders)
  
• Reduced crashes seen at main menu when framerate is set abnormally high in software.
  
• Fixed occasional issue of radar map expanding and obscuring half the screen.
  
• Fixed errant call to offline resource which would delay launch of game.
  
• Modifications to numbering system visuals that affected players using emulators (Wine) in Linux. Numbers will now display normally.
  
• Improved framerate on some systems by disabling memory state cache.
  
• Added support to allow ESC'ing out of the end of match debrief screen.
  
• Input Method Editor (IME) support for Chinese language added.
  
• Fixed script so the replay delete actually works now.
  
• Numerous Crash fixes and library updates that were discovered and implemented for other Petroglyph titles which have been ported over to the 8-Bit Series to improve general stability and compatibility.

We hope you like it. Thanks for your continued support!

-8Bit

Can you believe it's been 4 years since the launch of our first in the series of 8-Bit Armies games!? We continue to support one of our most popular games for the players that made it great. And, what better way to relive all those co-op mission memories and massive 8-Bit Battles than to get together on this very special day that started the series!

On Wednesday, April 22nd we'll all be getting together (virtually, social distancing ya know!) to play online together and maybe even finish a few of those achievements that need a partner to complete. You can play any of the 8-Bit Armies games (Armies, Hordes, or Invaders) to participate since all games are interoperable.

Join our discord channel at https://discord.gg/0saHhNOgywJvxB2b or just jump into quickmatch if you want some quick 1v1 action. We'll be jumping into a few games and answering questions too!

And thanks again to everyone that helped by submitting bug reports, suggestions and feedback to improve the game during development.

-8Bit

Hey all!

We just wanted to say thank you to everyone that played, created, and competed over the last month to celebrate our 2nd year anniversary for 8-Bit Armies.

Congratulations to all our winners of the various Steam Gift Packs and Game bundles we handed out. We hope you had as much fun as we did. Everyone should have received their goodies by now, but if you didn't please feel free to let us know and we will look into it.

As you can see, we continue to support the game, so this is by no means the end. While not as frequent, more updates are coming down the road so check back often to see what else is in store for the series.

-8Bit ːsteamhappyː

Welcome to all our new players and all our die-hard fans!

We've just released a patch to re-enable harvester crushing, something many of you remember from our launch and have asked for. Harvester crushing now works in the following way...

• Multiplayer Quickmatch / Ranked games preserve the no-crushing rule for Guardian and Renegades Harvesters
  
• Skirmish and Custom Multiplayer Games now provide a checkbox option for turning harvester crushing on/off.
  
• Single & Multiplayer Co-Op campaigns have Harvester Crushing Turned on by default.

Please let us know your thoughts!

-8Bit

We’ve just hit the second anniversary of the 8-Bit Armies launch and it’s time to celebrate!

Beginning today we’re starting weekly contests with prize packages consisting of Steam gift cards and free games for players at the top of our leaderboards! Each week, the leaderboards will be reset at 5pm PST (00:00 UDT) giving everyone a fresh chance to make it into the top spots. We’ll also be drawing names randomly and giving away prizes just for participating in the weekly tournaments.

And if PvP isn’t your thing – we’ll have a some Co-Op events to participate in for those of you trying to finish up the Co-Op campaign and earn those last few stars. Specific times will be arranged to get online with other players (and us!) to finally beat those missions on hard mode and get those last few Steam Achievements.

A full calendar of events is below for the month of May. Tournaments begin immediately after the previous one ends and all winners are subject to Petroglyph review before prizes are awarded. All times are listed as PST. We will create posts and announcements specific to these events to explain further and announce winners. All winners are excluded from winning multiple prizes and cannot use more than one account in the tournament.

To participate, make sure you play a RANKED, QUICK-MATCH game. These are the only games accounted for in the tournament standings.

The calendar of events is...


May 2..................Now.......................Tournament Begins!
May 3..................5pm – 7pm............8-Bit Armies Co-Op Mission night.
May 6..................5pm.......................Week 1 Tournament Ends

May 10................5pm – 7pm............8-Bit Armies Co-Op Mission night.
May 13................5pm.......................Week 2 Tournament Ends

May 17................5pm – 7pm............8-Bit Armies Co-Op Mission night.
May 20................5pm.......................Week 3 Tournament Ends

May 24................5pm.......................Screenshot contest submission deadline -- Top 3
May 25................5pm.......................Map Creator Submission Deadline – Top 3 (updated!)
May 27................5pm.......................Week 4 Tournament Ends


Prizes are as follows for all categories and contests…

First Place - $25 Steam Gift Card, 8-Bit Series Bundle (all games, all DLC)
Second Place - $15 Steam Gift Card, 8-Bit Series Bundle (all games, all DLC)
Third Place – 8 Bit Series Bundle (all games, all DLC)

Random Prize Draws for Participation:

A free game from the Petroglyph Steam library of launched titles.

-8Bit

Hey everyone!

Thanks for the heads up on our March Update. It seems our custom map loader in the game was disabled. That issue is now fixed as of today. ːsteamfacepalmː

-8Bit.

Hey gamers!

We’ve been storing up a bunch of minor fixes and performance improvements to the 8-Bit Series of games over the last few months based on your feedback and some things we've found ourselves. In general, the game should be more stable, run even faster, use a little less ram, and make multiplayer gaming a little more solid. We hope you enjoy the new update and please let us know if you run into anything we should know about.

As always, we appreciate your support. ːsteamhappyː

-8Bit

• Fix for jump jet infantry being order-locked when a save then load is performed while they are mid-flight.
  
• Added a map validation check that looks for too many stacked structures and warns the user of such on save.
  
• Fix for crashing when pressing shift while the instance tab is active (in the terrain editor).
  
• Adding a warning message on save that displays if resource nodes are found near any start markers (can potentially break the AI by placing resource nodes around the starting points).
  
• Limiting playable bounds setting to 11 and above when creating a new map with the public terrain editor.
  
• Fixed a case of the camera constraint function oscillating between two values when the playable bounds is small in the map editor.
  
• Fix for replanning failing when the target area is covered by too much stuff (movement failed to reach clicked destination despite there being a path to get there).
  
• Optimization attempt #2 at reducing CPU load when pruning producing objects (server could run slow when a lot of units are queued up and buildings are being destroyed).
  
• General Save/Load fixes to handle rare cases where continuing a battle would not work properly.
  
• Timeout a lobby join after 10 seconds so that players don’t hang forever waiting to join.
  
• General bug fixes to AI to optimize performance and handle a few strategic situations better.
  
• Correction to allow for correct country code to be set when quickmatching.
  
• Various back-end improvements for performance and frame-rate.
  
• Improved data transmission between server and client
  
• Fix for soft-lock when someone disconnects before joining a multiplayer game.
  
• Fix for showing weapon FX under unexplored fog of war which would reveal other player’s weaponry and location of battle.
  
• Player names in lobby should update a little more frequently.
  
• Steam “Played with Users” should be updated now.
  
• Handled an issue where some custom maps could fail to launch in Multiplayer.
  
• Fix for getting disconnected when connecting to an instance if the instance takes a long time to load. For example, when downloading a custom map for the first time.
  
• Fix for not being able to launch a multiplayer game with everyone is assigned to a random team.
  
• Prevent players having blank multiplayer game names.
  
• Fixed three separate issues which would have manifested itself to players as a “random crash”.
  
• Battlecam tweaks to improve angles and identify the highest priority events.
  
• Fix for flickering load screen on some systems.
  
• Re-enabled Anti-Aliasing on ATI cards. Also, removed AA slider if AA isn’t available.
  
• Improved memory usage. Game optimized to use less.